The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric

Schmidt Number: S-3441

On-line since: 15th April, 2004

XIII

The
Three Realms of the Dead: Life Between Death and a New Birth

Today I would like to return to the subject of an
earlier lecture given here in Bern and to pursue it further along the
lines of what I am convinced must now be discussed among us. It is
clear to me that definite things demanded by the signs of our
difficult times must be said in public anthroposophical lectures, so
that they will penetrate human ears. I am also convinced that
definite spiritual scientific truths must now be spoken of among us.

In the previous lecture to which I refer, I described
the participation in earthly life of souls who have gone through the
portal of death. We undertook to study the type and manner of the
impulses of the so-called dead, who continue to participate in what
is done by human beings here on earth, and how connections are made
between the forces of the so-called dead and those of the living.
Today I wish to say more about this.

It must first be made clear that above all it is
necessary for life between death and a new birth to be presented in a
certain sense with images that have been taken from physical,
sensible life on this earth and from mental pictures we acquire
within this physical life on earth. Life in the sphere of the dead is
such, however, that it can be understood only with great difficulty
through earthly concepts and mental pictures. One must try,
therefore, to approach this life from various sides.

I would like to say that one such attempt was made just
before the outbreak of this world catastrophe in the
Vienna lecture cycle,
(see Note 10)
in which I spoke about life between death and a new birth
in relation to the inner forces of the soul. Today I would like to
draw your attention above all to a domain that in a certain respect
is and must be the primary concern for the human being in his earthly
life. It must be a primary concern that this very domain is closed to
the experience of souls who have gone through the portal of death.
Think how much we have, as earthly human beings, through mental
pictures that come to us from the mineral and plant realms. To these
mental pictures must be added all the impressions and mental pictures
that come to us from heavenly space: the starry sky above us, the
sun, the moon. Since they enable us during our earthly life to have
physical images as perceptions, they belong precisely to what I am
now calling mineral nature. This mineral nature, and essentially —
I say, essentially — the plant nature as nature, are excluded
from what souls will perceive between death and a new birth.

In this connection there is something especially
characteristic regarding the experiences of the so-called dead. When
we human beings here on earth confront the mineral or plant natures,
we have a quite definite consciousness. I have said on another
occasion, it is true, that it is an illusion to speak of the absence
of pain or the absence of pleasure in the mineral and plant realms.
Through what we human beings perform with our actions, however, we
make impressions on the mineral realm and also on the plant realm; we
can say with a certain justification that these realms remain without
such impressions, without such activities as are spread by pain or
pleasure, sorrow or joy. You know that if we as human beings smash a
rock, certain elemental beings will indeed experience pleasure or
sorrow, but this does not enter our ordinary, everyday consciousness.
It can therefore be said that within the experience of an ordinary
human being on earth, he must have the feeling that, if he breaks
rocks, if he undertakes any action within what is the mineral or
essentially plant nature, he thereby causes neither pleasure nor pain
in his environment.

This is not at all the case in the realm man enters when
he has gone through the portal of death. One must be clear above all
that there the slightest deed that man does, even if he only barely
touches something (we must bring into service words from earthly
language), is bound in this spiritual realm to arouse either pleasure
or sorrow; it arouses some sort of sympathy or antipathy. You must
therefore picture this realm of the dead in such a way that one
cannot barely touch something, cannot make even the slightest
contact, without causing whatever has been touched to experience
pleasure or sorrow, that is, without calling forth sympathy or
antipathy.

This has already been pointed out in my book,
Theosophy,
(see Note 11)
in which the realm of the soul is described and in which the
most important forces in that realm are sought precisely in the
forces of sympathy and antipathy. Such facts must become living
ideas, however. As one becomes conscious of the working together, in
a certain sense, of the realm of the dead and the realm of the
so-called living, one must also picture how the dead operate, so to
speak, in their own realm. They operate in such a way that they must
always be conscious that everything they do will call forth sympathy
or antipathy, joy or sorrow; everything they do induces, if I may so
express it, a resonance of living sensation. What one could call
insensitivity in the sense of our plant and animal realms is not
there at all on the other side of the portal of death.

In a sense, this characterizes the lowest realm that man
enters when he has gone through the portal of death. Here, when he
comes through the portal of birth into the physical realm, he enters
the lowest domain, the mineral realm. When he enters the spiritual
world, he finds himself in a realm with a universal faculty for
sensations, in a realm where sympathy and antipathy hold sway. Within
this realm he unfolds his forces; he works within this realm. When we
picture him as being active there, we must also picture the
sensation-bearing forces constantly proceeding from his actions,
forces carrying sympathy and antipathy.

What is the significance of these forces in the entire
web of relationships of the universe? You see, we have arrived at an
issue that can be unraveled for our physical, earthly life only
through spiritual science. You will realize its importance if you
consider all the implications. So much has occurred in the present
time that the person who will only find an explanation of the world
within the physical renounces any explanation that he does not
conceive of as an explanation.

Something that in modern times is regarded as such an
explanation is the principle of evolution for the animal beings
inhabiting the earth with us. I need only draw your attention to all
that has appeared recently to support what is called the theory of
evolution. One speaks today of the evolution of the animal world with
a certain justification, in that it is believed that the animal world
has evolved upward from imperfect beings to more perfect ones. A
better way to express it would be to say that the animal world has
evolved from undifferentiated beings to more and more
differentiation, finally to human nature, in so far as man is a
physical being. This theory of evolution has already entered popular
consciousness to a great extent. It has even become in a certain
sense a component of the secular religion of humanity. The various
religious faiths make an effort to reckon with this theory of
evolution. They no longer — at least in their more important
representatives — have the courage that was still theirs only a
short time ago to testify against this theory of evolution. To a
certain extent they have accepted it themselves and have come to
terms with it.

One could now ask, however, what is actually at work in
this evolution of the animal beings, if they evolve from imperfect to
more perfect beings. What is at work in all that one can observe in
the animal world, not only in its evolution but in the overall
existence of the animal world? Strange as it may sound to a modern
person, one discovers upon entering the realm inhabited by the dead,
through clairvoyant consciousness, that the forces prevailing over a
large part of the animal world are coming from the dead. Man is
called upon to be a co-ruler of the impulses in the cosmos. In the
mineral realm he has only to do with what he constructs as machines
and the like through his technology, in obedience to the laws of the
mineral realm. In the plant realm, it is a matter of what he sows and
cultivates as a gardener or farmer. In these two realms he can at
most take only second place during his life between birth and death.
With the realm that is mirrored here on earth in animal existence,
however, he is much involved, in that after death certain forces
immediately awaken in him, in that he immediately enters and works
within a domain of forces that rule this animal realm. It is in a
certain sense the basis, the foundation for his activity there,
precisely as here the mineral world is our foundation; it is the very
ground, the soil, on which he stands.

In our existence in the physical world we have the plant
realm rising from a ground provided by the mineral realm. Similarly
for the dead, the realm in which rule sympathies and antipathies —
which then extend into the life of the animal realm on earth —
provides the foundation for a second realm. In this second realm the
same things are not so much at work in the dead, the mere experiences
of pleasure or sorrow, the transmission of merely sensation-bearing
impulses that then continue, that then are active in the world. This
second realm works essentially with what can be called the strengthening
and weakening of the will forces belonging to a human being after death.
If you wish to know more about these will forces, refer to the
Vienna lectures,
(see Note 10)
in which I pointed out that the
will that is characteristic of the human soul between death and a new
birth is not exactly like what we call will here in physical life. We
can speak of it as will, however, although it is entirely different
there; it is permeated there by elements of feeling and by yet
another element that does not exist here on earth. This will in the
life of the human soul after death is in a constant ebb and flow.
When one is in communication with a dead human being, his soul life
is experienced such that at one moment he feels strengthened in his
will impulses, stronger in himself; at another moment his will is
somewhat lamed; it sleeps. His will fluctuates between becoming
stronger and becoming weaker. This is an essential aspect in the life
of the dead.

This strengthening and weakening of the will are
impulses, however, that flow not only into the basis for the realm of
the dead but also into the human realm here on earth, not, to be
sure, into our thoughts in ordinary consciousness but indeed into all
that we experience here as will impulses and also as feeling
impulses.

It is, of course, a strange fact that man, in his
ordinary consciousness as a physical, earthly person, experiences
clearly only his sense perceptions and his thoughts. Waking
consciousness only exists in this perception and thinking. Feelings
are actually only dreamt, and the will is generally slept through. No
person knows what happens when he just raises a hand, that is, when
the will plays into his bodily organism, in the same way that he
knows his thoughts. There is also the rule of the feelings; although
this is somewhat clearer in consciousness than the rule of the will,
it is still dark; it is no brighter than the pictures we have in our
dreams. Passions, emotions, feelings are in truth only dreamt; they
are not experienced in the light of consciousness that lives in the
sense perceptions and mental pictures, and our will is not
experienced consciously at all.

In all that plays into waking life as dream or sleep,
the dead are living. They live with souls who are incarnated in
physical bodies on the earth. They live in them just as we live
within the plant world, except that we are not inwardly bound to the
plant world as the dead are to our feelings, emotions, and will
impulses. They live continually in all of that. This is their second
realm. While here we unfold our feelings and sensations in human
life, the dead live in this life continually, and indeed in such a
way that the fluctuating, which I have just been describing as the
strengthening and weakening of the will, as the increasing or
declining of the will of the dead, has a certain relation to what
here on earth the so-called living are dreaming and sleeping through
as feelings and will impulses.

You can see, therefore, how little the realm of the dead
is separated from our earthly realm and what an inner bond there is
between these two realms. As I have said, under normal conditions
(with certain exceptions that I will mention later), the dead have
nothing to do with the mineral and plant realms, but they have very
much to do with what goes on in the animal realm. That is in a sense
the ground on which they stand. They also have much to do with what
goes on in the realm of human feeling and human will. In these realms
we are not separated from the dead at all, but it is like this: when
one goes through the portal of death and experiences the
strengthening and weakening of the will, one can live with the
so-called living in their physical bodies, though not with everyone.
There a definite law holds sway: one can live only with those to whom
one is to some degree karmically related. Someone living here who is
karmically a total stranger is not even perceptible to a dead person;
he simply does not exist. The world that the dead person experiences
has boundaries that were made by his own karma that had harnessed him
here in life. This world is not limited only to souls who are still
on earth; it extends also to souls who themselves have gone through
the portal of death.

This second realm thus embraces all the relationships a
person has made karmically with those who are still on earth and
other souls who like himself have already gone through the portal of
death. This realm rises out of another realm that is common to the
dead, a realm of animal existence, by which we must not picture
earthly animals! I explicitly said earlier that our animals on earth
reflect what exists in the spiritual world, that is, the group-souls
of the animals. In relation to the dead, we must think of the
spiritual being of the animals. From this common soil, then, there
arises for each and every dead person, in an entirely different sense
from what is the case in our earthly realm, an individual karmic
realm. One person has made this relationship, another has made that
one. Only that by which karmic relationships are balanced is there
from the human realm.

Yet another law rules there; it shows us how this second
realm is actually constituted. At first, whatever works on a dead
person in this realm in such a way that it strengthens or weakens his
will forces is limited to the circle of human beings in which he
moved during his last earthly life, perhaps at first even during just
a part of it. The individuals who were especially close to him, to
whom he was especially related who have passed through the portal of
death, are now still the ones with whom he lives particularly
intensely. The circle widens only gradually to include persons with
whom he had had only distant karmic relationships.

For some this lasts but a short time, for others longer.
One can scarcely tell from the way an earthly life has taken its
course how it will be after death. Many personalities, many souls
whom one would not have expected, appear in the sphere of the dead
person, because from the physical life one can easily make a wrong
assessment. There is a fundamental law, however, that the karmic
circle gradually widens, and the whole process of becoming acquainted
in this circle takes place exactly as I described it in the
Vienna lecture cycle,
(see Note 10)
where I dealt with life between death and a new
birth. What I described there as an important element in the life of
the dead is precisely this expanding life of will impulses. The will
impulses are now for the dead what mental pictures are for the
living, through which the dead person knows, through which he has his
consciousness. It is extraordinarily difficult to explain to earthly
human beings that a dead person knows essentially through the will,
while the earthly human being knows through forming mental pictures.
Obviously, this also makes it difficult to come to an understanding
with the dead.

One can thus say that this realm entered by the dead as
their second realm gradually widens. Later (this is always relative:
for one it happens sooner, for another later) more distant karmic
relationships are added to immediate ones. I mean this in the
following way. When a dead person has spent a certain time in his
life between death and a new birth, the circle of his experiences has
widened and stretched beyond those souls — be they on earth or
over yonder — with whom he had had particularly close karmic
relationships. These souls now have karmic relationships apart from
those of the dead person. It is like this: person A has a certain
relationship with person B but not with person C. One sees how the
dead person A lives with B as I have described and expands his
experiences beyond B. Later it comes about that B becomes a
go-between to person C. Previously A had had no relationship to C,
but now he acquires that relationship directly through B's having a
karmic relationship to C. Through this, the second realm slowly,
gradually expands over an extremely large area. One becomes ever
richer, as it were, in such inner experiences, experiences of
strengthening or weakening the will, experiences that gradually
accustom us to the realm of the dead — or living souls —
after we ourselves have gone through the portal of death.

An essential aspect of life between death and a new
birth is precisely that as souls we — if I may express myself
trivially — increasingly widen our circle of acquaintances.
Just as here in earthly existence we widen our experiences between
birth and death, just as here we acquaint ourselves with more and
more of the world around us, so there we undergo more and more
experiences that relate us to the fact that one senses the existence
of other souls, that one knows that through some of the souls one
experiences a strengthening of the will, through others a weakening.
This is an essential part of our experience there.

You can realize the actual significance of this for all
existence, for all cosmic existence. It means that actually, in a
certain relation between death and a new birth, a spiritual circle of
acquaintances is being formed among a great portion of humanity
around the earth, not just that faded ribbon the pantheists and
mystics dream and thrill about. Really, if we look at what we
experience between death and a new birth, we do not live all so far
from human beings on earth. This is not an abstract bond but a really
concrete one.

just as here on earth the animal realm stands as a third
realm above the mineral and plant realms, so across the threshold we
perceive as a third realm the realm of certain hierarchies, a realm
with beings who never experience earthly incarnations but with whom
we come into relation between death and a new birth. This realm of
the hierarchies is across the threshold the same thing as what gives
us between death and a new birth the fully intense experiences of our
I. Through the first two realms we experience “the other”;
through the hierarchies we experience ourselves. One can even say
that as a spiritual being within the hierarchies man experiences
himself as a son, as a child of the hierarchies. He knows himself as
be is related to the other human souls as I have described it; he
knows himself at the same time as a child of the hierarchies. As he
feels himself here, when he perceives himself in the cosmos, as a
fusion of the outer, natural forces and the surrounding cosmos, so
across the threshold he feels himself organized, as it were, as a
spiritual being through participation of the different hierarchies.

Here, if we observe ourselves as human beings —
this should certainly not engender any pride in us — we see the
so-called lower realm of nature and ourselves placed at the peak of
these realms of nature. We go through the portal of death and find
over there that we are on the lowest level of the realms of the
hierarchies but as the fusion of impulses from the hierarchies.
There, however, the fusion comes from above, while here it ascends
from below. Whereas here our I is sunk into the physical organism so
that it is an extract of the rest of nature, there our spirituality
is sunk into the hierarchies and is an extract of them. One can also
say that there it is our spirituality with which we clothe ourselves,
while here it is our bodily nature in which we are clothed when we
come through the portal of birth.

An imaginative perception can already picture the
general course of life between death and a new birth. Indeed, it
would be extremely sad for a person if he were not able to create
such mental pictures. Just think! We are not separated from the dead
at all in our life of feeling or of will. What is removed from our
gaze is only hidden from our sense perceptions and our mental
pictures. It will be a giant step forward in the evolution of the
human race on earth, in that part of human evolution that we still
must live through, if some day people become conscious of the fact
that in their impulses of feeling and will they are one with the
dead. Death can indeed rob us of our physical view of the dead and of
our thoughts of them. There is nothing that we feel, however, without
the dead being there with us in the sphere in which we feel;
likewise, there is nothing that we will without the dead being there
with us in the sphere in which we will.

I spoke earlier of exceptions regarding the mineral and
animal realms. Such exceptions are especially valid for our present
epoch. They did not carry much weight formerly, but we do not need to
speak of this now. In our time, in which a certain materialistic
conviction is of necessity spreading over the earth, human beings can
easily miss the chance to acquire spiritual mental pictures during
their earthly lives. In yesterday's public lecture I even went so far
as to draw attention to how a person, if he fails to acquire
spiritual mental pictures during his earthly life, chains himself to
this earthly life; in a sense, he cannot escape from it, and he
becomes therefore a source of disturbance. Many of the destructive
forces working in the earthly sphere come from these dead individuals
imprisoned in it. One must have compassion for such human souls
rather than judge them critically, because it is not particularly
easy to have to remain after death within a realm that is actually
not suited to the dead. The realms in this case are the mineral and
plant realms, actually that mineral realm that the animals bear
within them, that man himself bears within him. These beings are
permeated by the mineral realm. For individuals who have not absorbed
spiritual mental pictures, the situation is such that they shrink
from this experience after death; feelings are aroused at all times,
warning them that they cannot enter the realms that govern animal and
human spirituality and that they can enter only what is mineral and
plant nature. I can scarcely depict this, because language has no
words for it. One can only approach slowly and gradually what lies
actually at the foundation, because the approach is at first
something too frightful.

One must not imagine that such dead souls are then
permanently banished from the life I described earlier. They draw
near to this life with a certain dismay and fear, however, and rush
back again and again into the plant and mineral realms, because the
mental pictures they had constructed only have a certain significance
in the mineral realm, in the realm of dead objects, the realm of
physical mechanisms.

I consider it my main task today, through such mental
pictures as these, to arouse in the consciousness an understanding of
how the dead are participating in human evolution. One would really
like to say these things today in public lectures, but one cannot,
because people do not allow themselves such mental pictures unless
they have already gone through something that has been communicated
in our groups. By describing life between death and a new birth,
particularly in its relation to earthly life, one satisfies or, said
better, one is fulfilling the demand of our age. For a relatively
long time our age has discarded the ancient, instinctive mental
pictures concerning the realm of the dead, and now humanity must
receive new mental pictures. Humanity must free itself from
abstractions about the higher worlds and not merely speak of a kind
of general spirituality; it must come truly to perceive what is at
work as spirituality. We must be clear that the dead have not died;
the dead are still living on and working in the historical process of
human evolution. We must be clear that the forces that spiritually
surround us are forces of the higher hierarchies but also forces of
the dead. The greatest illusion that future humanity could entertain
would be to believe that the social life on earth that people develop
among themselves through their feelings and their will happens merely
through earthly arrangements, with the exclusion of the dead. This
simply is not possible, because the dead are already participating
within feeling and willing.

It may be asked how it will be possible in the midst of
impulses of the new age to develop consciousness in the right way to
perceive this kind of gathering with the spiritual world. The
evolution of humanity is proceeding in such a way that man in his
physical body with his ordinary consciousness is increasingly cut off
from the spiritual world. It was in order that man shall once again,
as physical man, find the right access to the spiritual world that
the Mystery of Golgotha took place in earthly evolution.

The Mystery of Golgotha is not only a one-time event
and, as such, the greatest single event in all of earthly evolution.
It is also a continuing event, an impulse that continues to be
active. Humanity must do something to allow this force to work on it
in the right way. For a long time I have been emphasizing that the
task of our spiritual science is connected with the impulse of
Golgotha, that spiritual science must exist in a certain way for the
impulse of Golgotha to be understood in the right way in our age and
in the immediate future. You can be sure that, as an earthly science
that has become at the same time the world religion, natural science
will gain greater and greater influence. I am often reproached for
seeming to be unfriendly to the natural sciences, even in their
radical developments, a reproach that belongs to the most
old-fashioned prejudices imaginable, because whoever understands the
course of the evolution of the earth understands that the natural
sciences cannot be proved wrong and that, on the contrary, they will
spread further and further. A kind of religious belief in them that
now sweeps through the world is not to be halted in any way. It will
come. It advances confidently, and it comes “for the blessing
of humanity!” The time will not be long, perhaps only a few
decades, before all the religious faiths will find themselves unable
to save even the most simple, primitive human beings from
consciousness of a purely natural existence such as natural science
cultivates. This is inevitable.

Something else is also certain, however. Just as the
purely natural scientific world conception gradually seizes human
feeling (Gemuet), it will be less and less possible for the spiritual
element itself to be cultivated by natural science. The spiritual
element will have to be brought in just as strictly scientific a way,
while natural science will still be recognizing the natural
existence. Knowledge of natural existence will become more and more
necessary for the fulfillment of those tasks that man in the future
will have to undertake between birth and death. Whatever will lift
him toward the spiritual world, however, will have to come to him
from a spiritual science.

There is now a fundamental impulse in the widest circles
to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha. This could be seen in earlier
epochs, but it is especially apparent in our own time. Today one can
already say that the greatest enemies to grasping the Christ impulse
are the priests and clergy of the various religious faiths, no matter
how strange this may sound. What keeps humanity furthest from the
Christ impulse is the way in which the clergy and the theologians
interpret this Christ impulse, because they are far from
understanding what it actually is.

It is not my intention today to say essential things
regarding the Christ impulse. We have already compiled a great deal
about it in the course of time and will continue to do so. I would
like to bring one aspect before you now, because it seems especially
important at the present time, namely, that human beings need to
perceive that the Christ impulse must, in the most profound sense, be
dealt with differently from other historical impulses. People see
that this is so, but they constantly make all kinds of compromises.
They speak half-truths; they do not have the courage for the whole
truth. What one must perceive is that it is impossible to speak about
the Christ impulse with the same methods with which one speaks of
ordinary history. Significant theologians say that it is foolish to
speak of the Gospels being true in an ordinary historical sense,
because all that can be offered as historical proof that Christ lived
can be written down on a couple of sheets of paper. Well-known
contemporary theologians thus acknowledge that it is useless to look
to the Gospels if one wishes to deal with them only as historical
sources. There is no way of proving that they are presenting
historical facts. This is considered to be self-evident today. All
that can be produced as historical proof similar to authentic
documents concerning other personalities of world history can be
written, according to the famous theologians, on a couple of sheets
of paper. The real significance of this is, however, that even what
stands written on those few sheets of paper is not true in the
ordinary historical sense.

Humanity will have to acknowledge the fact that
historical sources, such as there are for Socrates or Caesar, are
simply not there for the existence on earth of Christ Jesus.

His existence must be grasped spiritually. This is the
essence of the matter. Humanity will have to receive in the Mystery
of Golgotha something for which there are no physical proofs but
which must be grasped in a spiritual way.

Concerning everything else, humanity can always keep
searching for historical proofs, but for the Mystery of Golgotha
these will never, in the most profound sense, be of any use. Humanity
should be urged not to grasp this important event on earth in a
physical-historical way but to try to approach it with a spiritual
understanding. He who will not grasp the Mystery of Golgotha through
spiritual understanding of earthly evolution, without historical
documents, will never be able to grasp it. This is the will of the
gods, one can say. Regarding the most important event on earth,
humanity must exert spiritual activity. The Mystery of Golgotha can
always be refuted historically; humanity can understand it only if it
rises to a spiritual comprehension of the world.

Only spiritual science as such can speak of the reality
of the Mystery of Golgotha. One could say that everything else is out
of date. Read the recent book by a theologian, a book remarkable in
spite of everything, which develops all the Jesus theories of the new
age, from Lessing to Wrede. You will find proof in such a
presentation that in this field, history really must take second
place, that there must be a new kind of comprehension. This can be
found only on the spiritual scientific path.

We must understand this, my dear friends, and now in our
time the moment has come when human beings will really be able to
experience in a spiritual way the further activity of the Mystery of
Golgotha. This is the reason that I have spoken of the spiritual,
etheric reappearance of Christ in the twentieth century and that I
presented it in my first Mystery Drama. It will be a spiritual
experience, however, a spiritual, clairvoyant experience.

There is thus an inner relationship between the Mystery
of Golgotha and the necessary ascent of humanity, starting from our
time, to spirituality. Truly, from this time on, human beings must
rise to a certain spirituality. They must grasp in this coming time
that the Mystery of Golgotha can be comprehended further only by
spiritual activity, that Christianity must have an essentially
spiritual continuation, not just an outer continuation through
historical traditions or more historical research. I hope that what I
have just said will not be taken in an abstract sense, so that
someone will think, if he picks up one or two concepts about the
significance of the Mystery of Golgotha, that he has done everything
that needs to be done. It so often happens that way. No, one must
approach these things fully concretely. One must not only build
mental pictures about the Christ and His activity, but one must also
be able to find in a certain way the realm of Christ within the
earthly realm. Christ descended into the earthly realm, and one must
be able to find His domain.

Natural science, if it has someday developed to its
highest level of perfection, will offer a picture of the world as it
could come to be without the help of the Mystery of Golgotha. Natural
science will never of itself come so far during earthly evolution
that a physicist or biologist will be able to speak of the Mystery of
Golgotha from his presuppositions. All science, however, will
gradually, in so far as it deals with what goes on around us between
birth and death, become more and more a natural science. Beside this,
spiritual science will be drawing its content from the spiritual
kingdom.

The question now, however, is to find not just a science
but a way to stand within the spiritual realm, so that we do not find
only nature. In nature we will never find the Christ impulse. How are
we to find a way actually to place ourselves within the spiritual
realm, not merely to have knowledge of it? You recognize from what I
have been saying that the consciousness of modern and particularly of
future humanity will become a merely natural consciousness, a
consciousness of entirely natural facts, but that in addition to this
another consciousness must be added. An entirely different
consciousness must be added. For this new consciousness, the
necessity of comprehending the Mystery of Golgotha as a spiritual
fact will be, as it were, only the highest peak. The same approach as
is needed for the Mystery of Golgotha, a readiness to penetrate
through to the spiritual element in things, will have to extend
through the rest of life. This means nothing other than that, beyond
a purely natural view of things, there must enter human consciousness
an entirely different view of things.

This view of things will come and must come when man
learns, just as he now beholds the world of the senses through his
sense perceptions, to observe just as consciously the course of his
destiny in the world, in great events and small. What do I mean by
this? Today man pays little attention to the course of his destiny.
Consider some extreme cases, however. I will relate just one to you,
which will show you what I mean, and it is only one case out of
thousands. One could relate thousands of such cases, countless
thousands.

A man leaves his house to go for a walk along a path he
knows quite well. It takes him up a mountain slope to a rocky place
from which there is a beautiful view. He has often gone to enjoy this
view; it is his usual walk. On this day, while he is walking, a
thought suddenly strikes him as if out of the blue, “Watch out!
Look out!” He hears an inner voice, not as a hallucination but
in the spirit, saying, “Why are you going this way? Can you not
miss this pleasure just once?” He hears this in the spirit. It
makes him hesitate, and he steps off the path to think for a moment.
At once a tremendous mass of rock plunges down over the very spot
where he would have been had he not stepped aside; it would obviously
have killed him.

Now I ask you to consider for a moment what role destiny
was playing there. Certainly something was active. The man is still
alive. The lives of many human beings on this earth are connected
with his life. All of them would have been changed if the rock had
killed him. Something was accomplished there. If you try to explain
it by natural laws, you will never arrive naturally at the act of
destiny that took place there. Certainly you can explain by natural
laws how the mass of rock came to be loosened, how the man could have
been killed when the rock suddenly fell across his path, and so on.
In all that can be said about the matter, however, from the
standpoint of natural laws, the laws of destiny are nowhere to be
found; it has nothing to do with them.

I have related to you an extreme case, but our lives are
composed of just such things, in so far as our lives are a matter of
destiny. It is just that man does not notice it; he pays no attention
to these things. He does not notice these things as he notices what
is conveyed to him through his senses as natural facts. From day to
day, from hour to hour, from moment to moment, things happen of which
only one example has been given, the extreme case I have just
described. Think how often, for instance, you are about to leave your
house and are delayed half an hour (one must study even the small
things). Such things and similar ones happen thousands of times
during our lives. You only see what happens when you have been
delayed that half hour; you do not consider what would have happened
completely differently if you had gone out as scheduled half an hour
earlier!

Quite another realm is thus continually reaching into
our lives, the realm of destiny, a realm to which as yet modern man
pays no attention, because he casts his gaze only at what has
happened and has no interest in what is constantly being prevented
from happening in his life. None of you sitting here this evening can
possibly know whether three hours ago you may have undertaken
something that was then prevented from happening, something that
would have kept you from sitting here tonight, perhaps even from
still being alive tonight. You see only the thing for which spiritual
impulses were already gathered in manifold ways, through which the
thing did occur. You do not usually consider with ordinary
consciousness that what you do in life is a result of participating
spiritual impulses. Once you begin to grasp this fact, once you
realize that there is a realm of destiny just as there is a realm of
nature, you will find that this realm of destiny is no poorer in
content than the realm of nature. Into this realm of destiny,
however, which reveals itself, I should like to say, with particular
clarity when some extreme incident occurs such as I have just related
— becoming obvious to the human intellect — into this
realm of destiny works what I was describing earlier this evening.
Into the feelings and into the will impulses through which destiny
moves are working the impulses of the dead. In spite of the fact that
a man who says such things today is still looked upon by the entire
“intelligentsia” as a superstitious fool, it is
nevertheless true that, with the same exactness with which one
expresses a natural law today, one can also make the following
assertion: when someone has heard such a voice, it is this or that
dead person who has spoken at the behest of one or another hierarchy;
furthermore, from morning till evening, and especially from evening
till morning, during our sleep, the impulses of the dead are
constantly working into us, together with the impulses of the
spiritual hierarchies who work in our destiny.

I would like to mention something here. You know already
about the daimon of Socrates and what Socrates, that wise Greek, said
about it, that everything he did, he did under the influence of his
daimon. I spoke of this Socratic daimon in my small book,
The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind.
In my recent book,
Riddles of the Soul
(see Note 12)
the second chapter speaks of that learned individual,
Dessoir, and you can see what he had to say about such things. I drew
attention there to Socrates’ daimon. It was a matter of
Socrates' coming to consciousness of something that is active in all
human beings. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, certain beings directed
what the dead were to carry into human life. These beings lost their
power at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and the Christ impulse
took their place. Now you have the Christ impulse bound to human
destiny in the way described by spiritual science. The forces, the
impulses of the dead work as I have described into the sphere of our
will and feeling. The dead are active, but they also experience
strengthening or weakening of their own will. This whole realm is an
earthly realm, an earthly realm just like the realm of nature. Since
the Mystery of Golgotha, however, the Christ impulse is living within
it. Christ is the directing power in this realm that I have
described.

One will therefore have to found a science of the
Mystery of Golgotha. It will have to be known in the future that,
just as the world of natural facts permeates our world, so also a
realm of destiny permeates it as the opposite pole. This realm of
destiny is still scarcely noticed today. It will have to be studied
in the future just as fully as the realm of nature. When one does so,
one will know that in this realm of destiny one is bound up with the
dead. One will know that this realm, which we have in common with the
dead, is at the same time the realm of Christ. Christ descended to
earth to unfold his influence through the Mystery of Golgotha in
order to share with human beings on earth what we have in common with
the dead, in so far as the dead are active in the earthly sphere. (I
refer now not to exceptional incidents but to normal cases.)

This must not remain merely an abstract truth, merely a
conceptual truth, or perhaps just a “Sunday truth,” to be
recalled occasionally “because, after all, something of the
sort might possibly be true.” Man should walk through this
realm of destiny as consciously as he walks through the realm of his
sense perceptions; he should be able to go through the world making
use of his eyes and yet also feeling himself to be woven right into
this realm of destiny; he should be able to feel that in this realm
the forces of Christ are always united with the forces of the dead.
If these things were the case, dear friends, humanity would develop
in itself a real, concrete, and sensitive life with the dead. One
would experience, if one felt this or that or engaged in this or
that, that one is united with loved ones who have already passed on.
Life would become endlessly enriched.

At the present time we do not altogether forget our
departed ones. We hold them in our memory. An intense life —
and that will be the only true life, because otherwise life will be
slept through in so far as destiny is concerned — will take
hold of humanity and will lead one not only to hold the dead in the
memory but to the knowledge that when you do this, when you work
toward that, when you undertake this, when you succeed in that, this
or that dead soul is participating. Our bonds with the dead are by no
means severed by death; they continue. This enrichment of life is the
prospect for humanity in the future of the earth. In this fifth
post-Atlantean epoch, humanity is actually evolving in the direction
I have been describing, and truly, humanity will not be able to
survive the sixth epoch if people do not begin to feel these things
in the right way, unless they take the reality of destiny into their
consciousness just as completely as they now absorb the reality of
natural occurrences.

We must perceive concretely the connection of the
Mystery of Golgotha with the problem of death. This is what I wished
to point out today. This is something that is intimately related to
what must now enter the consciousness of humanity, because among the
many things lost by humanity is the possibility of still experiencing
true reality in the feeling and will impulses. Human beings have
gradually been lulled into a great illusion, namely, that they can
shape this earthly life according to earthly laws. This is the
greatest illusion to which humanity can succumb. We find its radical
extreme, for example, in the purely materialistic socialism, which
arranges everything according to economic laws, in other words,
according to purely physical laws. Obviously, materialistic socialism
would never accept the idea that when we human beings do the smallest
deed among ourselves, the dead are participating. Socialism is the
extreme in one direction. At the opposite pole is the extreme of
which all so-called idealists now dream, to create, without regard to
anything spiritual, purely programmatic organizations throughout the
world, both domestic and international, to promote programs through
which supposedly all war will be abolished. It is impossible to
convince people who cherish such an illusion that they do not thereby
destroy what they wish to destroy but rather are burdening themselves
all the more with the monster they had wished to destroy. There is
plenty of good will in these things. It is simply what must emerge
from the materialistic consciousness of this time, what results —
I would like to say — as the political peak of the whole
essence of the world.

It will lead to the exact opposite of the desired goal.
The important development that must spread over the earth is an
understanding of destiny. It is this that must take hold in the
making of laws and the forming of political organizations, because it
must provide the foundation for the structure of social conditions.
Whatever is incompatible with the spiritual evolution of humanity
will simply dissolve; it will break down or wear out. This is all
closely connected with what the signs of the times are proclaiming
today. We have no need here to do political campaigning, if I may
express it so crudely; naturally, we would not do that. The demands
of the times, however, must be observed carefully by persons who wish
to concern themselves with the spiritual evolution of humanity. It
must be understood that on the path most commonly traveled today, the
Christ will only be lost. He can be won as the rightful king and lord
of the earth only through humanity's ascent to spirituality. Of this
you may be sure: Christ must not be sought as the various faiths seek
Him today, faiths that in a remarkable way have already acceded to
every possible compromise in interpreting Christ — here and
there they have even agreed on how to celebrate the Christ as a god
of slaughter. Christ must be sought where He is to be found in
reality, through human beings coming to understand the realm of
destiny as a reality in which Christ will be found, as we have
suggested today. Only then will an international organization have
been created that will signify the spread of real Christianity over
the earth.

You have only to reflect for a moment to realize that we
have not yet approached this goal. Think what would happen if you
were to offer all the people who now talk about wishing to establish
peace around the world — and who does not talk about it! —
a program to make Christ available to humanity. Then peace would
come, lasting peace, in so far as it is at all possible on earth.
Imagine what all those organizations (created, I grant you, out of
sincere good will) would say if you presented them with such a
program! We have even experienced a “peace program” going
out from “Christ's representative on earth.” You will not
have found within it, however, much of Christ. I know that these
things are not taken seriously enough at the present time. Unless
they are taken seriously, humanity will not be able to follow a
healthy path. Just as it is a necessity that the Mystery of Golgotha
be grasped on a spiritual level, so it is also a necessity that human
beings understand clearly the signs of the times, that they see in
spiritual science something without which even the outer social
structure of the future cannot emerge.

In closing, I am obliged to say something to you that I
have also had to say to the other groups. It is an unpleasant task.
This matter is known to most of our friends; even so, I must make
formal statements for the sake of completeness. I do not know whether
you are all aware that the most unbelievable slanders are being
circulated in the world, tales of a character that one wonders how
such a monstrous impulse could invade people's minds. Our spiritual
scientific movement must be protected from such — one has to
say it — vicious slanders. It is necessary, therefore, for the
immediate future, regardless of the fact that help ought to be
available to our friends for problems relating to esoteric
development, that what have been private conferences in the ordinary
sense can no longer take place. It is precisely these private
conferences that have given rise to the slanders. This statement in
itself would be incomplete, however; a second must follow it, namely,
that whoever wishes to — obviously, only whoever wishes to! —
may relate quite frankly and fully everything that has been said or
done at any time in these conferences. There is nothing in our
movement that needs to be hidden, if one speaks the truth.

I am obliged to take these two steps. Give me a little
time, however, and I am sure other ways and means will be found by
which to allow everyone their spiritual scientific rights. The
spiritual scientific movement must not be interrupted, however, by
things that have nothing whatever to do with it. It is therefore
particularly those who belong most truly and honestly to our movement
who must understand that these conferences in the ordinary sense can
no longer take place and that I also release everyone from any kind
of obligation. Anyone anywhere may make known what he wishes; no one
must, of course, but as far as I am concerned there is no
restriction, for there is nothing that cannot be told if one reports
the reality, the truth. In order that the truth may be established,
however, both requirements must be fulfilled. It gives me much sorrow
to have to take these measures. I know, however, that the friends who
stand closest to our movement will fully perceive its necessity and
will be in complete agreement with it.

We need to be conscious now of the seriousness of our
present situation. For this reason, such a gathering as this is for
me a particularly important, serious event. Especially now, in this
catastrophic time, I hope we can be truly permeated by the
consciousness that we need to stand together in support of our
anthroposophical cause, to stand together in the spirit. Even if for
the time being we find we are not able to meet together in space, let
us remain together in spirit. This is the wish I would express as I
part from you: we have been together in space; now perhaps for a time
we must be together only in the spirit.